Sparrow Lorelei photo gallery

Time at home in the fourth month, 9 August - 9 September, 2009

Story time! We read "stories" semi-regularly, when I remember - she's a bit more physically active than she used to be, so I read less than I did. Stories are play rather than relaxation. This is one of my current favourite books - it once belonged to James. I like it because it has the words in it for a lot of the things I talk to Sparrow about, so I can practice my German and look things up when I need them, plus it has good big colourful busy pictures so we can "read" a page or two and talk for a while.

One of this month's projects has been facilitating the cat-baby interaction. The cat has decided that it will be a permanent fixture in our lives. And it's a lovely, friendly beast, very affectionate. Mostly I keep it outdoors, but sometimes it comes in - it's a lovely lap cat and likes the warm sunniness of the room. So my job is to make sure that cat and baby get to be fascinated with each other (and Sparrow is!) in suitably short and supervised doses without it all going pear-shaped. This is from the beginning of the month, when Sparrow wasn't consciously grabbing things unless they were kind of in her hand already, and the cat was still trying to sit on her mat and brush up against those flailing hands. When Sparrow forgot to let go, the cat got grumpy and started to bite, then got cross with me because I treated it like *it* was the one in trouble. So I developed a new rule which I trained the cat to, which is that cat doesn't get to sit or stand on the baby's mat. Ever. Now they interact quite nicely, though I still supervise very carefully. Sparrow now *does* know how to grab, the cat loves being patted, and Sparrow's hands are always waving tantalisingly...

Naptime. She is so cute! I have been more consistent this month about trying to get her to sleep in her own bed during some of her day naps, just for practice. Variable success. But it's worth persevering with making sure she gets regular chances to practice going to sleep on her own without being in the middle of everything (where she definitely prefers to be). That little blue sleeping bag has been great, but she outgrew it this month. Now she only wears the brown one I made for her. She still only sleeps half an hour to forty minutes at a time during the day. That's normally fine, but it's not long enough for me to sleep too (I need forty five minutes asleep for one cycle, plus five to ten minutes to get to sleep, so an hour is ideal). About two thirds of the way through this month she started a patch where she was waking up very frequently during the night again and always waking up crying and grizzling rather than just making cute noises at me (what happened to our habit of practicing charm?). I got a bit ragged because there was never enough time to get a catch-up nap too.

I tried her in this elephant suit that we were given, I think by Maggie or some of her friends. I'm not sure why an elephant suit has teddybear ears, but hey. I do like the blue on her. The suit was a little bit big at this point though, and then that day turned unexpectedly warm so she spent as much time out of it as in it. We'll see how it goes - she's growing into it during spring, which can be both warm and cold.

So here she is in the wizard dress that I made, on the mat I quilted, on the rug that Coral crocheted. Colour, texture and pattern, much! What a riot! She seems bewildered, and I can only wonder what she'd think if she could see this.

Sparrow spends a bit of time with me in the kitchen each day. She had almost outgrown the black cushion when I took this photo - she is getting so long! At the end of this month she was measured at just under 62 centimetres. I know that's only ten centimetres longer than when she was born, but that 10 cm seems to mean her legs and feet and head get so much more in the way of things now. The blue blanket is the one that Nola sent us, with the "S" sewn on for Sparrow. It is lovely and warm, and Sparrow will happily sleep under it if the kitchen gets too boring.

It got mild enough one day for us to go "play" in the main living room - the coldest of the living spaces and generally too cold in winter to spend much time in. And by play what I mean is clean up and tidy :-) so we got the couches arranged for visitors and everything vacuumed. That's about as much housework as she lets me do in one hit, even though the vacuum was a new cool thing to watch, so then our next "play" was to lie around on the couches talking and pulling faces at each other. James had been having a bit of a rough patch at work, so I hit on the idea of taking a picture of us to send him as a cheerful thing. Then I discovered that my phone would let me record a sound file of us "talking to Daddy" and send it, so we did that too. This is the photo.

She was rapidly outgrowing her 000-sized clothing, most of which was borrowed and I needed to return to Sarah anyway. So I started dipping into the box of 00 clothes that we've collected, either as gifts or occasional second-hand purchases. This little Bonds suit from Linda is 00, and fit very nicely, though I think she looks a little bit like a prisoner in it. She certainly felt put upon and anti-authority when this photo was taken. Somebody did NOT want to go to sleep no matter HOW tired she was, and if being cute wouldn't make me pick her up again she would fight the blankets vigorously to the end...

Time to shuffle the toys around again, and introduce some new ones. This is Yama. Most of the stuffed toys she's been given are still bigger than her head, and when you can't quite hold things on your own that's still a problem. Yama, however fits the bill nicely. We're not sure what Yama is. Leah, who gave it to us, thought it might be a snail. I have come to the conclusion that despite the appearance of being triangular, the eyes are not on stalks and so it is more likely a llama sitting down, in a blanket. But that could be a shell, I guess. I like the colours - very soft and touchable and warm looking without being bright. Sparrow seems happy to hold Yama, though it's more by accident at the moment than anything. It took a go or two before she paid much attention, but she does seem to like watching Yama, and smiles if Yama gives her a "kiss".

The smell of baking bread from downstairs got to me one day, as did a description of making bread from a friend online. So I got the Spud to "help" me make a loaf. Here she is exerting all her considerable charm in the sunniest part of the house to make the yeast multiply. It's a beer bread, so the book room smelt a little fragrantly of hops and honey for the day. I haven't made bread for over a year and the yeast was a little old and Melbourne is a little cold, so in the end we never got much multiplying or doubling or rising going on, and the bread came out kind of like Pratchett's dwarf bread. I may have to look into making the bread in the crockpot so it gets enough heat to rise. But making it was fun. She likes it when I make things in the clear bowls because she can easily watch what I'm doing and how it all stirs together.

Coral's crocheted rug was lovely, but she couldn't really interact with it on the floor. Except to get her fingers stuck in it when she was on her tummy, which produced a certain amount of grizzling. So I took it off the floor and washed it, then draped it over the cushions instead. Now she will lie on the cushions and look at it with some fascination - she likes the stripes. And as she started to consciously grab things, this became an immediate plaything. She likes to pick it up in one hand and pull it around and look at it, and to stick her fingers in and out through the holes, and will turn to face it when she's going to sleep on the cushions. I like the way it brightens up the room and adds more rich colour and texture detail.

There was no reason to take these two photos other than that she was being extremely cute at me. Don't you agree?

She has developed a lot more head and neck strength, which means we can be a lot more physical in how we play with her. She loves being lifted, carried and (as here) flown. Daddy is very cool, because he likes to play these games with her. Mummy gets a little more tired -smile-. But we still have fun with them, and she likes the sound effects I make as I lift her up and down and pull her around.

This photo does highlight an issue that emerged this month. Sparrow began to drool a lot - it's unbelievable how much liquid one little baby can produce. She hadn't really drooled before. Apparently this is common around this age, it's a pre-teething thing. She doesn't drool constantly though, she seems to save it up and then let go big gobs at a time. The best time for doing this is apparently when she's directly over Daddy. I have not tried to train her out of this.

She has now grown enough that around the end of this month she stopped fitting in the baby bath. Well, technically it's still longer than she is by a fair margin, but not when you add in all the wiggle. She has very strong legs and likes to kick. When I bath her on my own a lot of water goes everywhere, and my back gets tired trying to hold her face out of the water while she's arching and pushing herself around. So I got James to help me with a bath one evening instead of doing it during the day, and to him the difference was very obvious. So the next thing to try was putting her in the big bath, where she could push herself around without banging her head. This of course needs adult assistance. Daddy took on this responsibility, and here they are, having a first bath in the big bath. See the frantically kicking and splashing legs? (and Daddy protecting his tender bits from the flailing arms?) She loves the big bath.

It was all going well, so I left the two of them in the bathroom while I went next door to tidy up in the kitchen. And then I heard the loud yell "Honey, please help!". I came running and she was happily floating on her tummy in the water between Daddy's knees, head supported by one of Daddy's hands, and having a great old time. Unfortunately, she has developed this habit when I carry her of holding tight to my hair anytime she feels unsecure about how she's held. And this floating thing was new, so she'd grabbed the nearest hair to hand and was holding on for dear life and looking around her and chirping merrily. Daddy was a little less amused. There's a trick where you stroke the back of their hand to make their grip relax, but I was laughing so hard I couldn't do it effectively. After I'd killed myself laughing for a minute I remembered that it's a security of hold thing and instead of trying to free her grip, just put both my hands under her to hold her up. Sure enough, a few seconds later she'd forgotten that she was holding anything and released (it only takes a few seconds to forget things like that if there's no need to hold on). She was promptly moved up onto Daddy's chest and given her flannel to hold instead.

Out doing the laundry - a regular morning job with the regular range of colours and items (which I talk to her about in both English and German). Today, however, we've washed a new toy before giving it to her for use: the rattlesnake. I got it from the swap party we had at the end of the Mama Green workshops, along with a PopIn cloth nappy (a really well designed cloth nappy) and a couple of pieces of clothing for when she is older. There are some surprises hidden under the different patterns of cloth, and she has enjoyed discovering those. I like hanging the head in front of her and shaking it. It rattles, and she tries to catch it and bring it to her mouth. I call this baby fishing.

This month ended just after Fathers' Day. James' first, and I thought about what to do to make it special. We'd already sent off a framed photo to his father during the week, and I snuck back to the photo lab the next day to get this card printed for him. We have a lot of cute photos of James and Sparrow together, and I liked this one. During the week beforehand we'd gone to visit Gemma, who was visiting Melbourne to be trained in using a seeing eye dog. While we were there Sparrow had started to grasp and hold her rattle for the first time. Up til then there'd been no definitely deliberate grasping, just a little bit of looking at hands and then what might or might not have been attempts to use them, but suddenly there it was. So in a fit of optimism I got one of my big marker pens and tried to get her to hold it for long enough to "write" on Daddy's card. It took a couple of tries and a lot of juggling of card, baby and pen, but here we have it: Sparrow's first piece of "writing". The fine print reads "Mummy says don't ask what else has red pen on it now".